Apr 17 2025 - The Boss has come out of Hibernation

 

There's video available to see "The Boss" as he comes out of hibernation this year.  He lives in Banff National Park.  He's a 200 - 300 kg grizzly bear. He's 24 years old, and has a reputation for "being the biggest, baddest bear in the Bow Valley"..."his reappearance is a clear reminder for hikers and locals to stay alert".  Here's another biography of The Boss: "But one bear stands alone in both legend and data. Officially, he's Bear 122. Locally, he's known as “The Boss” — a grizzly who has outlived rivals, shrugged off a collision with a train and fathered a significant slice of Banff's grizzly population." And here's another bear to take note of: "Split Lip is best known for being The Boss' main rival. They have been filmed chasing each other, and we can only speculate as to who left the scars on his lip!" Do you know that grizzles are cannibals?  "Split Lip is also infamous for cannibalizing other bears in the Park, which is common for grizzly bears of his size. In 2015, he made the news for eating a smaller grizzly bear who was only 1/3 of his size! Parks Canada couldn’t confirm whether he had killed the bear himself, but it’s likely that he did." "Like the Boss, Split Lip does not seem to be aggressive towards humans – at least so far. He caused a stir when he shared a hiking trail with a group of 20 hikers at Johnston Canyon in 2016, and again when he crossed the Pedestrian Bridge in Banff in 2017" There's some footage of the Boss on train tracks just before the train comes on Petapixel here

The daffodils are starting to bloom in the garden.

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Mar 13 2024 - Eleven Hours left to count flowers

 

This is the 49th annual Victoria Flower Count Festival.  Only 10 hours left to get that flower count in.  The count concludes at 4:00pm Pacific time today.   How did it go in 2023 - how many blossoms did people count in one week? 2023 “Bloomingest Community”: Sidney: 7,580,503,851 2023 Community Runner Up:  North Saanich: 7,558,368,163 2023 Winning School: Hillcrest Elementary 2023 Total Municipal Blooms Counted: 33,386,900,082 There's a running count on Facebook with wonderful spring pictures - https://www.facebook.com/FlowerCount Victoria is ahead of Sydney so far with 8,153,733,174 - that's well ahead of last year.   We seem to trying to catch up to Victoria time - there are daffodils blooming in the garden.   Here are some Paperwhite Narcissus.

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May 17 2022 - And on to Aquafit

 

There's a lot of jarring of the joints in exercise classes.  Jumping jacks, skipping, running are essential parts of cardio classes.  I decided that I would give aquafit a try starting in January 2022.  Our Y is only 10 years old, and it has amazing facilities, including an excellent swimming pool.  Aqua aerobics are much easier on the joints and muscles given the support of water.  There is a greater range of motion allowed because of the lower impact of gravity.   There seems to be emphasis on calories burned in articles describing the benefits of a water aerobics class, so how many calories would we burn in a work out class? Take our Wednesday HIIT (high intensity interval training) class.  It follows a pattern of 20 seconds of intense burn followed by a 10 second rest.  It consists of a circuit of different exercises so there's lots of variety. While our classes are 45 minutes, a one hour class is said to burn between 600 to 900 calories.  That seems like a lot. In comparison, my guess is that our cardiomix class burns the most calories as there are no intervals off.  The articles say 600 calories for a cardio class.  And our water aerobics? Water aerobics is expected to burn between 400 to 500 calories per hour.  Ours seems to be a gentle sort - aimed at the seniors in the pool. I'm now at the 5 month mark of doing aquafit two times a week.  And the promise is accurate - there is a definite  increase in strength in arms and legs -the pushing and pulling against the weight of water is excellent resistance training. As I check out the calories burned in a typical exercise class, it is very funny that exercise programs have strange and very noticeable names.  The example that got my attention: "The Insanity workout "  It involves bodyweight exercises and high-intensity interval training.  Insanity workouts are performed 20 to 60 minutes at a time, 6 days a week for 60 days.  Who would produce something called an Insanity workout? Beachbody with their Battle Tested Programs.  That's who.   A double daffodil in the garden. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

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Apr 12 2022 - Seven WAVES

 

If we get to seven waves of COVID, will we have some special luck by that point?  Will COVID come to an end, sort of, maybe?  Or go on to endemic status, which the experts assure us does not mean it will be harmless.  It will be predictable. I found an analogy to describe epidemic vs endemic.  "If you think of a disease as a regular-size KitKat bar, Baker says, and you open the package one day and there are six pieces instead of four, that candy bar is acting more like an epidemic (that is, a sudden spike of a disease that could lead to a pandemic if it spreads globally)." ""An epidemic means more cases than we expect," she explains. And if you unwrapped a KitKat bar to reveal six pieces, you'd know something was wrong — "it throws you off, you know something's happening," she says, just as you know that you can't count on things staying the same when there's an epidemic." An endemic means that it has reached a steady state where it doesn't cause large outbreaks.  So aren't we behaving like it is in an endemic stage?  Thinking we can take off masks in indoor spaces as OMICRON isn't very severe? There's more in the article HERE. How many waves did I expect?  My guess was three or four.  It was based on the 1918-20 pandemic - it had two (or three) phases with the later ones more severe.   There have been 10 outbreaks since 1889-92.  The article and chart are HERE.  And that article summarized how many waves were in each. The last five outbreaks, since 1957-58, occurred in the space of two years; Five outbreaks are described as having a second phase  The article says that "the theory of pandemics is murky" - and whether COVID would recur in phases or sporadic outbreaks, or even disappear altogether.   This is my personal idea of "waves"-  daffodils.  Like William Wordsworth: I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

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March 23 2021 - Today's Hottest Jobs

 

The jobs that came up for the hottest jobs were a sorry group - caregiver, nurses aide, and so on.  I was thinking more about careers that young people might aspire to, not minimum wage jobs.  So I eventually found the hot jobs in IT. Today a project in IT is managed by someone with a certificate in PMP, PMI or Scrum Master.   There's a title! What would I do as a Scrum Master? "As a Scrum Master, you’ll help your team perform at their highest level. As the expert of Scrum values, principles, and practices, the Scrum Master protects the team from both internal and external distractions. Scrum Masters tend to be people-oriented, have a high level of emotional intelligence, and a passion for helping their team members thrive." "In a nutshell, Scrum requires a Scrum Master to foster an environment where: A Product Owner orders the work for a complex problem into a Product Backlog. The Scrum Team turns a selection of the work into an Increment of value during a Sprint. The Scrum Team and its stakeholders inspect the results and adjust for the next Sprint. Repeat" Scrum brings to mind the dictionary definition - a place or situation of confusion and racket; hubbub. verb (used without object).  The Scrum approach is based on the rugby formation of players - locking arms, packed closely together with their heads down, attempting to gain possession of the ball.   Isn't this an obvious male athlete metaphor. It makes me think somehow this is attractive to engineers.  That's because I remember them at Imperial Oil talking about playing "toilet footfall" which they called a "scrum game".  The football is thrown high in the air and everyone piles towards and then onto the person it will land on or will catch it.  Hence the toilet reference as the person and football are buried far below the group.   Soon the first Daffodils will be blooming - not these, though, these are the last to bloom Poeticus, Poet's daffodil. Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Jan 3 - - New Stuff Just In

FutureTimeline.net on its home page says Welcome to the future!  Explore our timeline of future predictions... Latest updates HERE are fascinating.   The 2020-2029 Entries are HERE Most of these are big-scale, government sorts of milestones.  It is in 2024 that something everyday seems to come up:   Bio-electronics for treating arthritis is in common use Arthritis is a form of joint disorder caused by trauma or infection of a joint, or old age. As of the 2010s, it was the single most common type of disability in the United States, predominantly affecting the elderly and resulting in over 20 million individuals having severe limitations in function on a daily basis. Total costs of arthritis cases were close to $100 billion annually, a figure expected to increase dramatically in the future with an aging population. Treatments for arthritis usually involved a combination of medication, exercise and lifestyle modification, but a cure remained elusive. In 2014, a breakthrough involving the use of bio-electronics was unveiled by researchers. This took the form of a pacemaker-style device embedded in the necks of patients, firing bursts of electrical impulses to stimulate the vagus nerve – a crucial link between the brain and major organs. The impulses were shown to reduce activity in the spleen, in turn producing fewer chemicals and immune cells that would normally cause inflammation in the joints of patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Over half of people saw a dramatic improvement, even for severe symptoms, with up to 30% achieving remission. After successful clinical trials, another decade of progress led to next-generation implants miniaturised to the size of rice grains, as well as improvements in cost and efficacy. By 2024, it is a routine form of treatment in many countries.Bio-electronics are showing promise in other areas too. For example, they can prevent the airway spasms of asthma, control appetite in obesity, and help restore normal insulin production in diabetes. This has personal meaning to many of us and gives us optimism for our future health and well-being.

We're into January and this is the month I seem to do a lot of "colouring".   I started with a spring image of daffodils and put them through the Topaz Lab Impressions Filter.

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Humans will be Hybrids

Ray Kurzweil, Director of engineering at Google, spoke those words in 2015.  I heard them quoted by T Bone Burnett in a CBC interview yesterday.  He is a legendary American record producer, musician  and songwriter.  He says he had a recurring dream in his youth

"When I was a kid I had a recurring nightmare from the time I was five until I was fifteen that these stormtroopers dressed all in black, looking kind of like Darth Vader really, came into our church and would start cutting each person's right hand off and replacing it with a new hand that would be their memory and their guide and their communication system, and it was this amazing new thing. But it was a nightmare - I would wake up from it every night in a cold sweat, that they're doing this. Then the other day, I picked up my iPhone and I realised, oh, they didn't have to cut off our hands. They just put it in our hands, you know? This is what they're doing – we're living in a surveillance state. This beautiful communication system that we developed, that was supposed to destroy all of these old, archaic structures, and a lot of them needed to be destroyed to be sure. It's funny because my empathies are so with the anarchists on one hand, but on the other hand, there is this deep history and it's the only way we remember who we are."  This quote is from a quietus interview HERE. 

Back to Kurzweil: what he predicted is that humans will be hybrids in the 2030s - our brains will be able to connect directly to the cloud, where computers will augment our existing intelligence. It will happen via nanobots - tiny robots made from DNA strands.  

The Globe and Mail story yesterday has a story about brain augmentation:  "For the past four years, Morgan Barense and her research team have been developing a virtual hippocampus, using digital technology to mimic a brain structure that is critical for consolidating memories. Their result is a phone-based app, called the Hippocamera, designed to allow Alzheimer’s patients to compensate for damage to this area of the brain.

A core function of the hippocampus is something called “hippocampal replay,” she explains. That is, the hippocampus acts like a movie projector, replaying memories over and over in high speed. Over time, with repeated broadcasts, the cortex, or the large outer portion of the brain, learns these memories, she says.

The Hippocamera, then, is like an external movie projector, designed with only two modes: record and replay. It allows users to record short video clips of daily events they wish to remember, prompting them to first give a brief verbal description. In the replay mode, the videos are shown in high-speed with audio of the user’s verbal description played over top."  There we are - a step in the journey to human hybridization.  

In just over a month from now early spring flowers will be blooming. Victoria being well ahead of us starts its Victoria's Flower Count tomorrow.  

 

Februalia Closes and the Cows Come Home

Lupercalia, the February 15th purification ritual of ancient Rome has come and gone. The thought.com website says that today we celebrate it with the hearth goddess, Vesta. The month was originally known as Februalia,  It is still a celebration for modern Pagans today, and is considered part of their spiritual journey. As children we were taught that pagan beliefs were non-religious beliefs.  Modern Paganism today is a collective term for new religious movements influenced by or claiming to be derived from the various historical pagan beliefs of pre-modern Europe, North Africa and the Near East.   Does February have any other distinctions? February frequently occurs in lists of the most commonly misspelled words in the English language.  The Americans have trouble with the word February too – last year, a press release from the White House consistently spelt it as Feburary.  Much Ado About Nothing is the only Shakespeare play that mentions February.  February is the only month that can pass with no full moon. This occurred in 2018.  As February closes and Martch starts, we move into the ancient Romans' New Year. March is packed with familiar holidays and events:  daylight saving time, celebrations of Pi Day on 3/14, St. Patrick's Day, the Vernal Equinox and the start of Spring occur, and this year, we celebrate Easter. The budget news that made me smile is the reopening of the Kingston prison farms, closed by the Harper government as a cost-saving measure. There have been protests outside the prison every week for the past 8 years.  They vowed to remain there until "the cows come home."  There is a long article HERE.  The snow drops, snow crocuses, winter aconites, witch hazel and pussy willows are blooming.  These miniature daffodils were in the conservatory at RBG.

Daffodils

Spring time in Niagara has such wonderful surprises.  I found a growers field of daffodils and have photographed it over the last few days.

Daffodil Days

The Canadian Cancer Society raises funds every March through selling daffodils.  This year at the Canada Blooms, the daffodil theme was everywhere, and I took this image as a touching tribute to the fight against cancer.